Someone yelled, “Snakes!”
Someone yelled, “He’s blocking the way!”
Someone yelled, “Ma-ma!”
Someone yelled, “No, wait! Wait, it’s only—” That was me, but there was no holding anything back by then.
Realizing what he’d done, Frank crumpled in the door, but when you’re that big, you don’t crumple far. He was in the middle of saying something when a chair flew across the room and hit him on the chest. The only effect that had was to make him drop the snakes. Which started all new yelling: “They’re on the floor!” “Look out!” “Get out!” “Snaaaaaaakes!”
I didn’t know whether to go for the snakes or Frank. I chose Frank. Somewhere in the uproar, Willy Snakespeare shouted, “Leave ‘em alone! They don’t bite!”
For an instant I saw Lily down on her hands and knees, snake hunting. Thank God her face was lit with laughter. In the midst of that chaos she was laughing!
Others weren’t. They were panicking. The birthday party had made many of them hyper, but this shotgun-blast entrance of a real roaring giant and writhing snakes helped push their gas pedals down to the floor, way past their speed limits.
So what could I, the accused, do? First, fight through the mob to the monster from Jupiter and get him the fuck out of there.
I was ten feet from him, arms already outstretched to intercept, when the pain hit. It burst up from the middle of my back and was unimaginable. I staggered, fell to my knees. It went away, returned twice as bad. I tried to wrap my arms around myself to protect from the agony inside, but no way. Part of me was trying to kill the other parts.
I didn’t pass out, though there was only black crushing pain. No party, snakes, earth. Only pain and I couldn’t breathe and there was no doubt I was dying. Just let me die and this pain’ll stop. Let me die because nothing, nothing could be as bad as this.
If only I had been so lucky.
“What is that?”
“That is a kernel of rice, Mr. Fischer. Your stone was about half this big.”
“How could something so small hurt so much?”
My question seemed to satisfy the doctor, as if I were a student who had asked the correct question in class. “The places it has to pass through are very small. Kidney stones are the most excruciating pain a man can experience. They’re the equivalent of birth pains in women.”
“Women bear children, we bear rice kernels. And you said I might get them again?”
“They do tend to recur. But you can fight them by drinking water and keeping yourself flushed.”
He was a boring man who made himself more of a bore by repeating things constantly in a pontifical voice only his mother or another doctor could have loved.
As a parting gesture, he very dramatically placed the guilty rice on the bedside table and left. The kernel sat next to an art book opened to a poster that stated:
ADMIT NOTHING
BLAME EVERYONE
BE BITTER
I had kept it on that page for two days and would probably leave it there until I left the hospital, despite the fact that almost every visitor insisted the snake debacle hadn’t been my fault. Gus said it was an asshole idea, but the result wasn’t “really” my fault. Mary Poe split the blame between her husband, herself, and me. “I should’ve gone along. I knew I should have gone and kept an eye on him, but I was selfish. I admit, I wanted to finish my book.”
What Lily and Lincoln thought mattered more than anything, and both of them were unanimous in their approval.
“There’s this girl I hate, Brooke? I had to invite her ‘cause I went to her stupid birthday party. But you know what’s really cool? I know she peed in her pants when she saw the snake. Patrick Klinkoff told me.”
“Why are you embarrassed, Max? No one was hurt and they have something to talk about. How many kids’ parties can you say that about? In ten years they’ll still be saying, ‘Remember that crazy party where the snakes got loose?’ I was scared too for a few minutes, but I loved it. I also haven’t laughed so hard in ages. Snakes, wrestlers, monsters… Did you see what happened to the birthday cake? Oh God, it was fun!”
It’s easy to love people who forgive us. Deep in my secret heart I also thought what had happened at the party was funny, but other parts of me that didn’t like to fail and didn’t like to be embarrassed felt Max Fischer should go live on the bottom of the ocean with the other creeping creatures. To top it off, falling down in the middle of a disaster I had created was no help. I have been healthy most of my adult life, but have also been haunted by the idea of suddenly collapsing because my body fails or shorts out like an electrical fuse. Why had this longtime fear actually happened at that party? Were the gods creating the special effects, or had I only overdosed on trying to make a good impression?
No matter what you are there for, hospitals humble a person. Without saying a word they tell you you’re older, more fragile, susceptible to things you never imagined possible. You can assume someone died in the bed you occupy. Your backless nightgown covered people who had no hope of ever leaving this final land of long corridors and the small hissing sounds of thick shoes and cart wheels. A day there is waiting for meals and test results. The only thing you can be sure of is there will be old magazines on the table at the end of the corridor. You try to remember where you were on the outside when you read that same magazine three months ago. It makes you inordinately happy to remember it was at a friend’s house or the barbershop.
I had a kidney stone. It was excruciating but the doctors knew what to do with it. They shot some kind of rays into my side that broke the thing down and allowed it to pass. Afterward I couldn’t get rid of the image of stones in my body. It was as if a part of me had slowly but secretly begun the process of dying and returning to primal substances. I was shown a picture on a screen and proudly told, “There it is, that’s your stone.” I looked because it was proof of me gone bad, defective, terminal. Some essential organ had created it, the way it might normally have cleaned my blood or processed food. How could I do this to me?
There are days or weeks in life where so much happens that it can take months, even years to sort out all that has taken place. Two weeks after I met the Aarons, booby-trapped their birthday party, and had a first serious meeting with my own mortality, I sat at home looking out the window at a bird feeder, not much interested in doing anything else. My mind was full of sighs and flimsy thoughts. The book I’d been reading with enthusiasm only days before lay untouched by the bed. For something to do, I cleaned the apartment. Which only added to my dispiritedness because when I’d finished and was looking around, it reminded me of a picture in a magazine. One of those anonymous, well-kept “homes” you glance at uninterestedly and flip the page. No personality, no distinction. Whoever lives there does things in the approved way, owns the right objects, even develops kidney stones at the statistically correct time of life. In the hospital, a girl was pointed out who was allegedly dying of a mysterious unknown disease. People were in awe of this tragic child. She drew doctors like suitors and made million-dollar machines work as hard as they could just to keep her alive. I knew it wasn’t her but the disease that made her interesting, but still. Still.
Walking in from collecting the mail one morning, I heard the telephone ring. I wanted to ignore it because of what was in my hand, but unlike other people, I cannot disregard a ringing phone. It makes me both excited and uneasy for the same reason—what’s coming from the other end?
I was holding a child’s drawing of a smiling man. The picture included his whole head and neck. In the middle of the neck, looking as if it had been swallowed whole, was a big red rose. Written in unmistakably adult script at the bottom of the page was: “We agree we both have a rose in the throat for you.” I receive a fair amount of fan mail, but my first rushing hope was this had come from Lily and Lincoln. Kid’s artwork, grownup’s handwriting. What did it mean, “a rose in the throat”? The phone kept ringing. One thing at a time.